The Freedom Fighter's Journal: Constitutional Conservatism

Friday, July 23, 2010

Constitutional Conservatism

TIA Daily • July 19, 2010

COMMENTARY

By Robert Tracinski

Last week, I linked to an interesting profile of Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, in which he discussed his intention to form a "Tea Party Caucus": a small but influential bloc of radical pro-free-market senators.

But there was one part of that profile which I thought deserved a separate commentary all to itself, because it is an issue much wider than Rand Paul's candidacy. That was his use of the term "constitutional conservative" to describe his political views.

This comes up in the context of the interviewer asking Paul to identify himself as a "libertarian" like his father, Ron Paul. Here is the passage:

So is Paul a libertarian like his father? Depends on what you mean by that, he says. He tells us that he sees himself as a "constitutional conservative." But he adds, "If you say that libertarianism means you really believe in a stricter construction of the Constitution, that you believe in a government that is much closer to the way the Founding Fathers envisioned," then yes, he could be considered a libertarian of sorts.

The term "constitutional conservative" is quite new. For all I know, somebody may have coined the term decades ago, but its use as a common description of a "camp" within the right is a product of the Tea Party movement, and it is an example of the kind of positive intellectual change that has happened in the past eighteen months.

First, let's look at precisely what the phrase means, as I have gathered from how it is being used. A "constitutional conservative" is someone who wants to restrain the power of government within the original limits set for it by the US Constitution. Specifically, "constitutional conservatives" want to resurrect the doctrine of enumerated powers, which constrains Congress to stick to the small number of limited powers explicitly described in Article I of the Constitution. Hence, Rand Paul cites one of the top agenda items of the "constitutional conservatives": a requirement that all legislation proposed in Congress has to "point to where they are enumerated in the Constitution."

The label "constitutional conservative" is based on the recognition that our system of government, as originally conceived by America's Founding Fathers, would be radically smaller than it is today, that the Founders' vision is fundamentally incompatible with the majority of current government programs and with the vast array of current government controls on the economy.

It is clear that the rise of this new term is a powerfully good trend. For the first time, there is a strain of "conservatism" that we can actually sign on to—though the use of the term "conservative" is still a misnomer. "Constitutional conservatism" is "conservative" only in the sense that it seeks to "conserve" the original meaning of the Constitution. But in today's context, it is actually a radical and ideological agenda that would require overturning the past one hundred years of political precedent.

So how did this trend come about? Here's what I think is going on. The government's reaction to the financial crisis—the whole "counter-revolution" that has disinterred Marxist, Old Left statism—has suddenly focused everyone's attention on the need to defend the free market as the paramount political issue of the times.

(I believe this will be the top issue for the better part of a decade, and that's if things go well. If we're very lucky, the first moment we will be able to breathe easy will be the 2016 election—if a pro-free-market president is elected in 2012, actually manages to roll back the Obama agenda, and then sees his or her agenda ratified by the public in a re-election victory.)

The effect of this has been to unite the "libertarian" and the "conservative" wings of the right. The libertarians have joined with the conservatives partly because they have begun to realize, I think, that the attempt to create a third party, the Libertarian Party, has failed. They've tried for 40 years and never gotten more than about 2% of the vote. So instead, a lot of the libertarians have been focusing on joining the Republican Party and trying to reform it from the inside.

More widely—and this is the main reason the third party bid failed—the libertarian "brand" has been wrecked by the Libertarian Party's embrace of a huge element of subjectivism. Among seedier elements, this led the Libertarians to let in anarchists, to place way too much emphasis on legalizing drugs, and to adopt a bizarre quasi-leftist pacifism in foreign policy. Many libertarians now seem to want to de-emphasize those issues and focus on the case for the free market.

Rand Paul is an interesting example of this. He indicates that he favors withdrawal from Afghanistan, but then he vows not to make it a campaign issue or to do much about it when he gets into the Senate. So he's sympathetic, at least, to the Libertarian foreign policy—but he knows he can't act on it without alienating Kentucky voters, so he steps down hard on the soft pedal.

At the same time, the label "constitutional conservative" gives conservatives an opportunity to soft-pedal religion and emphasize a pro-free-market agenda—without committing themselves to renounce their religious agenda entirely. Some are comfortable with this trade-off. Others, I'm finding, are not, and I've recently encountered some religious conservatives who are very disgruntled with the Tea Party movement. I'm going to look into that some more and report back to my readers on this trend.

For now, let's just take this as a warning about the term, "constitutional conservative." It does not resolve the ideological difference between religious traditionalists and secular pro-free-marketers. It just pushes that difference to the background.

But on the positive side—and it is very substantial positive—it is a label that has managed to unite conservatives and libertarians in a broad electoral coalition, on terms that emphasize the best element of each side's ideology. It is certainly a better, clearer ideological banner for the political right to rally behind than we have been offered in my lifetime.—RWT